Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

This is an interesting spam email I received recently, from an ip address (125.42.36.225) registered to China Network Communications Group Corporation, No.156,Fu-Xing-Men-Nei Street, Beijing 100031 and the email address helolonihao@sina.com.cn, offering me a “letter from firefox:”

From: “a letter from firefox”
Subject: [spam] a mail from firefox

welcome to download firefox,It’s free and easy to use.Join the millions of people worldwide enjoying a better Web experience.please click the url to download it

The link itself is extremely complicated; it encodes two different Google PPC actions:

1. Register a Google adsense click with publisher id ca-ref-pub-1379698615564904
2. Takes the clicker of the ad to a referer page for the Google adsense / firefox bundle

It’s an interesting idea–using an email spam campaign to generate google clicks. I wonder if the Chinese spammer involved here is being naive, as Google should easily determine, from the lack of a referer field among other things, that the click is invalid.

Directed by Sin City director Zack Snyder, 300 is a real treat. I had the pleasure of viewing it about two weeks ago, and I was visually impressed. The plot is quite simple, based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Xerces is coming from Persia to conquer Greece, and Sparta must stand against it. They attempt to drabble palace intrigue, prophecy, love, and betrayal onto the canvas of the plot, but it fails. 300’s true power isn’t in the story itself, but the brilliant saturated way it’s told.

In this massive picture post I’m going to try and tell some of the story of 300 in linear order. If you haven’t seen the movie go away now because it will spoil the glory of seeing its scenes for the first time!

There’s plenty of boyhood flashbacks and children in the movie, enough to make you wonder about the innocence of humanity.

But then the Persians come, make their demands, and are thrown into a well in this climactic, but expected scene. After all, they used it as a clip in their previews.

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There are some initial skirmishes; of course the Greeks slaughter them. The imagery is mundane to prepare you for the next tumultuous scene:

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GLORY!!!!!! This is maybe the best battle scene I’ve seen; it’s almost like a dance. The style is identical to the fight scenes in the Matrix, but less artificial and more visceral.

Here there be dragons. And other monsters. For some reason, having killed large numbers of Persian soldiers, 300 decides to throw nightmares at the Greek force.

300 also has a small tragedy. Father and son shouldn’t fight together; it’s a recipe for sorrow.

The emperor of Persia is evil, has a voice which is too low, and effeminate facial features. He can’t be more scary.

But he gets what he deserves…

Especially when 10,000 SPARTANS decide to join the fight!! GO!

I recently wrote a post about how fast my site runs only to have it fall on my face this morning. Having used crap 1and1 and switched to Cari.net about a year ago, I have experienced 100% uptime from them. Except for occasions when I piped random garbage into iptables or ran chgroup recursively on important operating system files, the server has been consistently up and working at a high level of performance.

This morning it went down for approximately four hours. A Cari.net support tech issued the following statement:

This morning the C2 dedicated hosting facility here at Cari.net suffered a series of power events caused by a loss of main power from SDGE. During this time, feed lines which connect our facilities to our primary generator fused and were rendered non-functional.

The UPS systems provided the 20 minutes of protection as designed, but repairs were not able to be to be made within that short protected window. Power systems were unstable as repairs were made. As of this moment, we believe we have rectified the issues and we do not anticipate any further issues.

Interestingly, a very alert reader sent in the following:

I’m looking for a good dedicated machine hosting service and saw your recent plug for cari.net. I ended up setting pingdom to monitor your site as a result so I could see how fast and reliable cari.net hosting is. Last night your site was up and down for about four hours – was that you, or unreliability on the part of cari.net? Do you have any records as to the reliability and/or performance of their hosting?

I have to say that the power failure today seems catastrophic and unexpected, and that they did an excellent job of keeping us informed and fixing the problem. Even though their yearly SLA is no longer the advertised 99.999% (1 – 4/8765.81277 = 99.9544%), I am still a satisfied customer. Compare to Dreamhost, who admit on their blog that they had 95.0838% uptime in February and keep a running list of shame.

Stick with professional, dedicated hosting. Everyone lies about their SLA is the first rule when choosing a webhost. You get what you pay for is the second.